04.08.09

After years of admiring photographs of his work and acquiring books and pillows , I finally got to visit two of his physical masterpieces in the flesh: The Compound Restaurant and the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. Girard deserves a much deeper article than I have time to write, but I'll just start with the fact that he truly mastered multiple disciplines, from lettering to illustration to objects to interiors to exhibition design , all in a signature style that was warm and human and perfectly imperfect.

12.06.09

Ib Geertsen is the grand old man of Danish abstraction, but was little known in the UK until he was championed by London's Rocket Gallery in a recent group show with other Danes associated with an abstract movement known as Konkrete. ... He trained as a gardener rather than an artist, but came to prominence as a painter in the 1950s with other Konkrete artists, and pursued with them a distinctive hard-edged, geometric abstract language which arguably pre-dated comparable developments in America.

02.04.09

“ Mid-Century Modern Furniture Poster ”, recently submitted to our photo group Technical illustrator James Provost is offering his lovely poster of mid-century classics as a print at Imagekind . The first reader to list the names and designers of all the pieces in the poster will win a 16" × 24" print, courtesy of the Mid-Century Modernist.

02.03.09

Discovered last weekend during a family move, an unopened gift from my late father to my brother and me: eight travel posters he and my mother collected during their travels to Switzerland, France, Italy, and Austria in the ’60s.
Mom and Dad in the Swiss Alps, Fall 1963

01.02.09

More on those later, but first: Londoners shouldn’t miss the upcoming exhibit at Rocket Gallery: “ Ib Geertsen, mobiles, paintings, screenprints ” from 6 February to 28 March. ... For those not in the know, the Rocket is a contemporary art gallery with a soft spot for classic modern furniture, having shown work by Kjaerholm , Risom , and others .

21.12.08

The titles for the great Carey Grant/Audrey Hepburn caper were designed by Maurice Bender , the man behind the famous James Bond gun barrel openers. Charade is a classic specimen of mid-century modern graphics and animation from the golden age of film titling.